Carrying the Word: The Concheros Dance in Mexico City

By Susanna Rostas

In Carrying the Word: The Concheros Dance in Mexico City, the first full length study of the Concheros dancers, Susanna Rostas explores the experience of this unique group, whose use of dance links rural religious practices with urban post-modern innovation in distinctive ways even within Mexican culture, which is rife with ritual dances.

The Concheros blend Catholic and indigenous traditions in their performances, but are not governed by a predetermined set of beliefs; rather they are bound together by long standing interpersonal connections framed by the discipline of their tradition. The Concheros manifest their spirituality by means of the dance. Rostas traces how they construct their identity and beliefs, both individual and communal, by its means. The book offers new insights into the experience of dancing as a Conchero while also exploring their history, organization and practices.

Carrying the Word provides a new way for audiences to understand the Conchero's dance tradition, and will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Mesoamerica. Those studying identity, religion, and tradition will find this social-anthropological work particularly enlightening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Jan 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781607320043

Book preview

CARRYING THE WORD

MESOAMERICAN WORLDS: FROM THE OLMECS TO THE DANZANTES

General Editors: Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma

Editorial Board: Alfredo LÓpez Austin, Anthony Aveni, Elizabeth Boone, and Charles H. Long

After Monte Albán, JEFFREY P. BLOMSTER, EDITOR

The Apotheosis of Janaab’ Pakal, GERARDO ALDANA

Carrying the Word: The Concheros Dance in Mexico City, SUSANNA ROSTAS

Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica,

NANCY GONLIN AND JON C. LOHSE, EDITORS

Conquered Conquistadors, FLORINE ASSELBERGS

Empires of Time, ANTHONY AVENI

Encounter with the Plumed Serpent,

MAARTEN JANSEN AND GABINA AURORA PÉREZ JIMÉNEZ

In the Realm of Nachan Kan, MARILYN A. MASSON

Invasion and Transformation, REBECCA P. BRIENEN AND MARGARET A. JACKSON, EDITORS

The Kowoj, PRUDENCE M. RICE AND DON S. RICE, EDITORS

Life and Death in the Templo Mayor, EDUARDO MATOS MOCTEZUMA

Maya Daykeeping, JOHN M. WEEKS, FRAUKE SACHSE, AND CHRISTIAN M. PRAGER

The Madrid Codex, GABRIELLE VAIL AND ANTHONY AVENI, EDITORS

Maya Worldviews at Conquest, LESLIE G. CECIL AND TIMOTHY W. PUGH, EDITORS

Mesoamerican Ritual Economy,

E. CHRISTIAN WELLS AND KARLA L. DAVIS-SALAZAR, EDITORS

Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage,

DAVíD CARRASCO, LINDSAY JONES, AND SCOTT SESSIONS, EDITORS

Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God,

GUILHEM OLIVIER, TRANSLATED BY MICHEL BESSON

Rabinal Achi, ALAIN BRETON, EDITOR;

TRANSLATED BY TERESA LAVENDER FAGAN AND ROBERT SCHNEIDER

Representing Aztec Ritual, ELOISE QUIÑONES KEBER, EDITOR

Ruins of the Past, TRAVIS W. STANTON AND ALINE MAGNONI, EDITORS

Skywatching in the Ancient World, CLIVE RUGGLES AND GARY URTON, EDITORS

Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and

Distribution in a Maya Community, DEAN E. ARNOLD

The Social Experience of Childhood in Mesoamerica,

TRACI ARDREN AND SCOTT R. HUTSON, EDITORS

Stone Houses and Earth Lords, KEITH M. PRUFER AND JAMES E. BRADY, EDITORS

The Sun God and the Savior, GUY STRESSER-PÉAN

Sweeping the Way, CATHERINE R. DICESARE

Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist, ALFREDO LÓPEZ AUSTIN

Thunder Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,

ANATH ARIEL DE VIDAS; TRANSLATED BY TERESA LAVENDER FAGAN

Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, H. B. NICHOLSON

The World Below, JACQUES GALINIER

CARRYING THE WORD

THE CONCHEROS DANCE IN MEXICO CITY

SUSANNA ROSTAS

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

© 2009 by the University Press of Colorado

Published by the University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rostas, Susanna.

  Carrying the word : the Concheros dance in Mexico City / Susanna Rostas.

       p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-87081-960-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

     1.  Folk dancing—Mexico—Mexico City. 2. Religious dance—Mexico—Mexico City. I.

Title.

  GV1628.M49R67 2009

  793.3’10972—dc22

                                                                                                                       2009023099

Design by Daniel Pratt

18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11   10   09                   10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Cover: Dancer probably from a country group playing his concha at Tlatelolco.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Max Harris

Preface and Acknowledgments

1. Incongruous Beginnings

Experience and the Embodied Self

The Action of the Dance

The Locus of Attainment

The Zocalo as Palimpsest

An Oral Tradition

The City as Experiential Context

The Chapters

Titles and Word Usage

PART 1: THE EXPERIENTIAL CONTEXT

2. The Concheros

The Association and Its Palabras

The Principal Dance Events

The Sacred Geography of the Four Winds

A Mesa and Its Organization

The Jefe and His Oratory

The Sahumadora

The Captains: Cabeceras to Palabras

Other Positions: the Sergeant and Alferez

The Soldiers

3. The Obligations: Framing the Context

A Vigil in Puente Negro

The Limpia

The Dance

PART 2: THE EXPERIENTIAL NEXUS: FORMING THE SELF

4. Agency and the Dance: Ritualization and the Performative

Analyzing Ritual and Performance

Toward Ritualization

The Performative (or Performativity)

From Performance to the Performative

Mimesis: Learning to Carry the Word

The Relationship between Ritualization and Performativity

5. Conchero Speak: Carrying the Word

The Ritual Language of the Concheros

The Banner

Union

Conformidad

Conquista

El es Dios

Carrying the Word

6. Clothing Matters

Style and Aesthetics

The Chichimeca Background

The Precursors

Aztecquismo

Aztec Style

The Mexica Asthetic

Women’s Vestments

The Showing of Position

Inspiration, Competence, and Protection

Clothing Matters

7. Why Dance?

Dance in Theory

To Dance

Getting the Feel of the Concheros’ Dance

The Interaction with Music and the Other Media

Dance as Work

As a Source of Power

To Transcend

Meaning?

Why Dance?

PART 3: POWER CONCERNS: PERFORMING THE SELF

8. Alliances and Identity Politics

Alliances

The Meeting of Jefes

Inheritance

Division/Fission

Identity Politics

9. Oral Tradition, Myth, and History

Mythical Antecedents

Documentation on the Dance

Confraternities

The Dance of the Moors and the Christians

The Chichimeca Trope

The Eighteenth to the Late Nineteenth Centuries

The Testimony of Compadre Ernesto

The Reliquia (Re)Establishes the Dance in Mexico City

The Palabra of Santiago Tlatelolco

The Gobierno

Ernesto Ortiz and His Mesas

10. The Mexica and Mexicanidad

Mexicayotl

The Fifth Sun

Mexicanidad Today: Nahui Mitl

New or Cosmopolitan Mexicanidad

A Nativist Spirituality?

New Agers?

Early Mexica Influences on the Concheros

The Mexica today

The Context of the Mexica’s Dance

Is It Just Show?

Epilogue

Appendices

1. Timelines for Santo Niño de Atocha

2. Spanish and English Names of Dances, 1989

3. Spanish and Nahuatl Names of Santo Niño de Atocha’s Dances, 2001

4. Principal Mesas in Mexico City of Significance to Santo Niño de Atocha

5. Genealogy of the mesas of Santo Niño de Atocha and San Juan de los Lagos

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

In December 1998, I was one of a reported 6 million pilgrims and other visitors who made their way to the Basilica of Guadalupe in the northern suburbs of Mexico City to celebrate the annual feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe (December 12). Over a three-day period, the huge atrium in front of the basilica was packed with dance groups from all over central Mexico. As many as thirty groups performed at a time, often competing with one another for physical space and musical audibility. By far the most popular, in numbers of both participants and watching crowds, were the Mexica dances. Men (and, to a lesser extent, women), in costumes loosely based on pictures of Mexica warriors and dancers from the old codices, performed to the loud and insistent rhythm of huehuetl and teponaztli drums. Similar in underlying form, but clearly different in conception, were the danzas de los concheros, whose quieter music was played on conchas, stringed instruments made from armadillo shells or, in some cases, from gourds. The Concheros have been around much longer in central Mexico, but on that feast day outside the basilica they were fewer in number and tended to draw smaller crowds than the noisier and more flamboyant Mexica dancers. (There were, of course, many other danzantes besides.)

I knew about the Concheros, both from having seen them dance elsewhere and from reading (among other things) Martha Stone’s classic At the Sign of Midnight: The Concheros Dance Cult of Mexico (1975). I had seen the Mexica dances, too—I first watched a small group dance, to prerecorded music, in Chalma in January 1972—but I had never seen so many Mexica in one place before. Moreover, I had not yet read any coherent explanation of the Mexica dancers’ intent or popularity. For understanding, I later turned to an article by Susanna Rostas, one of many published while she was working on Carrying the Word: The Concheros in Mexico City. Rostas’s article confirmed my sense that the Mexica dances had developed from those of the Concheros, that they were performed for the most part by urban mestizos with a New Age sensibility, and that they embodied, as Rostas called it, a kind of invented ethnicity.

I relied heavily on Rostas’s article when I wrote about this aspect of the Día de Guadalupe festivities. It is therefore with considerable pleasure that I have responded to the unexpected request to write a foreword to her book.

Carrying the Word is an important and much-needed study of the Concheros and their relationship to the newer Mexica dancers who (unlike the Concheros) aggressively invoke an imagined and revindicated Aztec past. Rostas’s book updates and, in many ways, moves far beyond Stone’s At the Sign of Midnight. Stone’s work is dated, not because she was an amateur (but very observant) ethnographer, nor because her work is anecdotal, as Rostas puts it, rather than rigorously scholarly, but because the danza de los concheros itself has changed so much since the twenty-five-year period (ca. 1945–1970) during which Stone studied and took part in the dance. One of the great virtues of Rostas’s book is her close attention to the fluidity of the dance, to the changes in its social organization and modes of performance, to its part in shaping the nascent Mexica dance, and, in turn, to its own capacity to be influenced by the Mexica’s dancing (while still largely dismissing them as inauthentic and ill-disciplined).

Rostas is an acute participant observer. She danced frequently with the Concheros group of Santo Niño de Atocha. She attended its vigils and other religious and social rituals. She sat through sometimes tense organizational meetings. She talked at length to members of the group and, rather than trying to homogenize their responses, has been careful to allow individual differences of interpretation to remain. To my mind, one of the more surprising developments that she uncovers is the apparently easy movement of some dancers between the Concheros dances, which are distinctly Mexican in character, and imported Sufi dance traditions. Both, according to the explanations offered by some of the more middle-class Concheros, emphasize the embodied transcendence reportedly possible for the initiate during the dance. This is language that I suspect was not much used by Stone’s informants fifty years ago. Rostas explores such claims both as an observant scholar and as an active participant.

Rostas is well-versed in both ritual theory and performance theory and grounds her discussion firmly in current scholarship in these fields. Happily, however, she does not privilege the language of the academy over that of the dancers themselves, allowing the two different forms of discourse to stand alongside one another as equal partners in her effort to document and understand the present state of the dance of the Concheros in Mexico City. Her book will be of considerable value not only to those who are particularly interested in the rich and varied forms of traditional dance in central Mexico but also to those wanting more generally to understand the ways in which traditional dance can both resist and adapt to a cultural context that is always shifting.

MAX HARRIS

Madison, Wisconsin

PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most in Mexico City know something about the Concheros, who are to be seen performing their dances—circular in form—in a variety of public places throughout the year. The Concheros contribute dramatically to the vibrant cultural life of the city and forge a direct link between rural religious practices and urban postmodern innovation. Few, however, know much about who the dancers are, what their dancing signifies, and the other activities in which they are involved (such as their all-night vigils). Despite the Concheros’ distinct religio-social identity, it is often assumed that the dancers are part of the Catholic Church. However, although their practices are indeed synergistic (and many dancers are at least outwardly Catholics), the dance as a tradition has retained its autonomy, thereby preserving many elements of a rural religiosity that goes back at the very least two centuries. The tradition has largely been an oral one until very recently, and despite claims that the dance never changes, an Aztecization of certain aspects has been ongoing for some time. This has, however, occurred more openly and extensively in the last four decades and been carried to extremes by those who call themselves the Mexica. The Mexica have brought many changes to the Concheros’ dance, although just as many appear to be linked to the deaths of an older generation of dancers. The decline of orality and the upsurge of a more inscribed approach are beginning to lead to practices being externally imposed rather than emerging from experience. The book offers new insights into the experience of dancing as a Conchero, of how the Concheros manifest their religiosity by means of the dance whilst also exploring their organization and practices.

The many groups of Concheros vary in the type of dancers they attract, but this book reflects my experience of dancing with one group—Santo Niño de Atocha. This group (or mesa) had more middle-class and professional dancers than any other, whilst still attracting many gente humilde (humble people), most of whom are mestizos (although some are of clear indigenous descent). This mesa and the many others with which I had loose affiliations shared similar feelings about the Mexica, whom they considered not to be a part of the Concheros’ association. But the Mexica’s influence on the Concheros has continued to grow in the last two decades as the latter have become ever-more interested in the Aztec past. Most in the group of Santo Niño de Atocha now strongly believe that the dance is Aztec in origin, despite an ongoing foundation myth that indicates it started much later and elsewhere in Mexico.

The project had its genesis when I stopped briefly in Mexico City en route eastward. I was going to Chiapas to carry out postdoctoral fieldwork in an indigenous community on religious change involving escalating affiliation to so-called protestant sects. In Mexico City, I had been asked to contact a friend of a friend, which led to my first encounter with Concheros (and I am grateful to Chloe Sayer for this initial introduction). Some time later I returned to Mexico City with a small grant. The project, as it turned out, was not only anthropologically extremely wide-ranging but also had, for me, a personal element. I had lived in Mexico in my twenties—before I became an anthropologist—in the village of Tepoztlan, Morelos (studied by both Redfield and Oscar Lewis, although I was not aware of that at the time). I lived as a painter among other painters, both Mexicans and foreigners, and went occasionally to Mexico City to find a gallery to sell my paintings, with the help of friends, and to broaden my horizons. When I returned to Mexico City to realize this project, I initially met a large number of people, most of whom danced in the group of Santo Niño de Atocha and some of whom I had known of or had come across me when I had lived in Tepoztlan. Although such coincidences came thick and fast at first, some five years later they were still happening. I had chosen to study an organization or association of people whom I had thought would be completely other but which I quickly found linked with this earlier phase of my life. The period as a painter had been a significant one for me, and now, on an anthropological path that I had never imagined, would lead me back; the dance had done just that, at least tangentially. This was then a project in which I was both an outsider but also something of an insider as the other was not quite as other to me as I had anticipated. The idea that the self may be discovered in the other and the other in the self has recently become much more a part of anthropological currency, for what we have now are multiple interconnected sites of representation or, as Taylor has put it, multiple authorial and spectatorial imbrications.¹ Although many of the people I danced with and talked to were in certain respects as other as my indigenous friends in Chiapas, many were middle-class and/or professional—only other in the sense that I am not Mexican and come from a different country (which provides grants to study others), whereas most of them, lacking such funding, are as interested in studying themselves.

I immersed myself in the dancing with an enthusiasm that paralleled that of most Concheros, in part because that was the only way that I could experience and hence begin to be able to understand what dancing under particular conditions can do for and to the mind-body. As Geertz has cogently put it, there is a need to have actually penetrated (or if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of life, of having, one way or another truly ‘been there.’ Favret Saada pushes this just a bit further: [T]here is no other solution but to practice it oneself, to become one’s own informant.² I was indeed my own informant but I also received a vast amount of help from various dancers, particularly in the group of Santo Niño de Atocha.

I am particularly indebted to the now deceased jefe of the group, Compadre Ernesto (Ernesto Ortiz Ramirez), who accepted me as one of his dancers and gave me his time on numerous occasions to discuss at length his memories of the group during the middle decades of the twentieth century. I want also to mention Ricardo López Ortiz, his great-nephew, his inheritor, and jefe until, despite his youth, he too died in 2008.

I am extremely grateful to Angelica Ortiz de Zarate, who has been acting as a (non-academic) ethnographer of the dance for years. She devoted hours of her time to me, often over lunch, to discuss aspects of the dance—elucidating events a few days after they had happened, explaining terms, indicating what was to be expected, what was new and unusual, and generally helping me to find my feet, both as a dancer and as an analyst of the dance. I have also received assistance from Ernesto Garcia Cabral, who has supported this project throughout its gestation, more recently communicating by e-mail, reading drafts of the chapters (despite being in English), and passing documents on to me. Antonia Guerrero found time in her very busy schedule to discuss points of complexity or contention and entertained me at her house, as did others, such as Eduardo Aguilar, who demonstrated some of the more difficult dance steps and elucidated some of the language (particularly that of the prayers). Alfredo Ponce but more particularly his wife, Linda, who comes from a family of dancers, helped me to see other aspects of the dance, whereas Margarita Montalva gave support when it was most needed. I am also extremely grateful to those other jefes who assisted me on various occasions: Guadalupe Hernandez, Soledad Ruiz, Andres Segura, Jesus Leon, Guadalupe Jimenez Sanabria (Nanita), Teresa Mejia, Conchita Aranda, and Herman. I too thank the dancers: Carlos Piña, Federico Sanchez Ventura, Felipe Gutierrez, the Kamfer brothers (Cuauhtemoc and Marcos), Rosa Elia (the latter’s wife and one of the Correa sisters), Miguel Gutierrez, Compadre Jesus, Roberto Partido (better known as Pando), and Berenice Garmendia. Also the many dancers whose first names are the only names I have recorded: Alberto, Daniel, Doroteo, Elvira, Francisco, Milagros, Nacho, Nanacatzin, Olga, Ollinkin, Oscar, Pera, Sonora, Susana, Teo, Tita, Tonahuitzin; the writers: Velasco Piña and Carlos Jimenez; the politicos: Margarito Ruiz Hernandez and Bernadina Green (although I am not sure she would agree with being so labelled). Thanks, too, to Enrique Figueras and Edwin Rojas; to the academics: Carlos Garma Navarro, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Andres Medina, Gabriel Moedano, Francisco de la Peña, Lina Odena Güemes, and Phyllis Correa. I mention also Anthony Shelton, who filled me in on the background to Mexicanidad at an early stage; William Beezley, who gave me early encouragement; Ruth Lechuga in Mexico City, who provided me with photos of the dance from the 1960s; Nigel Gallop, who loaned me a copy of Mexican Folkways by Frances Toor (when it was out of print); and David Maclagan, who gave me an invaluable copy of Kuruth and Marti’s book on Anáhuac dances.

Fieldwork for this project was made possible by means of a number of small grants from the British Academy (for a period initially of a few months but extended to six in 1989–90 and for shorter periods in 1993 and 2002) and twice from the Nuffield Foundation. I received a Grant-in-Aid of Research from the Leverhulme Foundation from 1995–1997 to assist part-time in the initial writing of this book.

In the field, at least at first, I went to as many dances as possible, stayed up for numerous all-night vigils (when invited to attend), and listened to, participated in, and when appropriate initiated conversations with dancers about the dance. I carried out semi-structured interviews only during the later phases of the project (from 1995 onward) with some of the jefes and dancers who are acknowledged above. Once I felt that I had a good understanding of what was going on, these interviews assisted me in ascertaining whether my intuitions were supported by the dancers’ own accounts and enabled me to put on record how the dancers themselves described the experience of dancing. I have tried where possible to obtain my information from more than one dancer: assertions that I make that are not referenced are of that type. The majority of the unattributed quotations are from Angelica. Where dancers are mentioned by name, this usually means that what was said was very much that dancer’s personal opinion or that I was unable to talk to more than one person about that particular aspect—or that I wish to highlight the differing views of a range of dancers.

Hiccups had to be overcome while writing this book. The initial tension was between my personal reluctance to write in detail about people who had become my friends and the demands of academicism, which required me to reveal the details of a tradition that has until recently been predominantly oral, hidden from public scrutiny, and passed on predominantly by word of mouth from father to son.³ However, in the past ten years or so, the Concheros themselves have made many more of their practices easily accessible. Several before me have set out to study the Concheros but have usually become dancers rather than writing about the dance itself. I too felt that pressure. What the dance seemed to be telling me was that I should stay in Mexico and dance and paint for a living, but I came back to England and carried on my work as an academic anthropologist.

I am grateful to all those who read the book outline and/or some or all of the chapters and gave me constructive comments, amongst whom were Nurit Stadler, Andrea Stockle, Harriet Bradley, Ben Smith, Marta Eugenia García Ugarte, Vicki Cremona, Barbara Bodenhorn, Piers Vitebski, Graham Harvey, and Susan Thompson. I am grateful too for the support given me by the Department of Social Anthropology, the Centre for Latin American Studies and the Computer Centre, Cambridge University. I am also very appreciative of all those at the University Press of Colorado who have undertaken most of the work of getting the book ready for publication: particularly, Laura Furney and Daniel Pratt. My thanks also go to the director, Darrin Pratt. Lastly, I thank my immediate family and those friends (and especially Ruscha Schorrkon, Susan Sellers, and Jeremy Thurlow) who have supported me in one way or another during the book’s gestation. Any inaccuracies are mine and mine alone. The photographs were taken predominantly by myself in 1989–1990 except where otherwise stated. I was never permitted into the circle to photograph nor could I take photographs as I danced.

0.1. The sergeant of a group of Concheros at Los Remedios in 1995.

The notion of ‘belief’ as a proposition to which the individual assents does not catch the quality of lived faith, where ‘belief’ has as much to do with affect, emotional, moral and aesthetic as with propositions. I therefore prefer to look to action, and its concomitant experience, to seek ‘religion’ in observances. The strategy requires rituals to be understood as performances devised to lead participant men and women through particular experiences: choreographed sequences of sculpted emotions developed out of a repertoire of prescribed actions which open a particular way to the sacred.

—CLENDINNEN, talking about Aztec dance (1990:110)

1.1. The flower form constructed during a vigil held in a house on the northern outskirts of Mexico City 1993.

ONE: INCONGRUOUS BEGINNINGS

Those occasions when we come across the incongruous are comparatively rare. In Mexico City in the early 1990s, however, I encountered just that: groups of dancers who, calling themselves Concheros, enacted a sacred dance, circular in form and sometimes preceded by an all-night vigil. In one of the largest cities in the world, a religious tradition that claims to have indigenous rural roots was still flourishing as unchangingly as it could, despite the pressures and complexities of everyday life at the end of the twentieth century.

My first encounter with the Concheros was at a velación (all-night vigil). Usually held some nine days after a death, this particular vigil was for a man whose sons were dancers. The deceased was quite well-known in the Mexico City art and media worlds as he directed films and was also a dealer in antiquities. The occasion was thus supported not only by Concheros, a heterogeneous group of people who come literally from all walks of life, but also, at least during the earlier part of the night, by the luminaries of cinema, theater, and dance. In marked contrast to the professional middle-class aspect of the gathering was the ritual that slowly unfolded and took on more significance as the evening wore on. By midnight, most of the party attendees had departed and those remaining were fully involved in the rite to honor not only the dead man’s soul (anima) but also those of the Concheros’ antecedents. What struck me most forcibly at the time was how contradiction-laden the occasion seemed. Here were apparently sophisticated urbanites in one of the biggest cities in the world performing the various rites of an all-night vigil with the care, dedication, and love usually found in Mexico in the rituals of rural peoples: the kind of religious devotion predominantly associated with those living in small face-to-face communities of a few thousand. In such communities people come together, from a sense of obligation as much as commitment, to celebrate a way of being by contacting one or more superhuman agents, a religion in the sense of a rejoining (re-ligio) with each other as much as the deity.¹

Although this particular vigil was not followed by a dance, a few days later I witnessed thousands of Concheros dancing at one of their major obligations in the small town of Chalma. The narrow, congested streets were filled with numerous stalls selling candles, small statues of saints, devotions, pamphlets, and the other bits and pieces associated with the kind of religiosity found in a pilgrimage town. As I got closer to the church, the sound became louder until suddenly, nearing the gates of its precinct, out in the open space of the atrium I was hit by the full force of the drums mingled with the sounds of various types of rattles and the fainter melodic music of various stringed instruments. The energy in the air was palpable. The courtyard was completely filled with what at first sight appeared to be a multitude of undifferentiated dancers who from a proximate high point could be seen to be dancing in circle formations. Each circle’s movements was constricted by those adjacent, each focused inward around its own upheld standard that, combined with the columns of smoke rising from the incense burners, gave a sense of extending inward and upward. The dancers were dressed in a wide variety of costumes, some with their bodies completely covered, others freer to move in more minimal accoutrements decorated with plastic silver and gold that caught the light as the sun descended toward the hills behind the church.

This was the end of the second day (Thursday) of one of the Concheros’ biggest dances. That particular obligation is held in a place that is not so much a town as a large shrine dedicated to the incursions of large numbers of people, where every other house seems to be an inexpensive hotel. Many large crosses stand on the steep, cliff-like protrusions of rock that rise steeply from the fast-flowing river. Some had already been brought down and decorated with flowers, to be followed by candlelit vigils held all night in their vicinity. Pilgrims unconnected with the Concheros had been arriving throughout the day on their knees, having placed on their heads small crowns of fragile orchids obtained at the Ahuehuete, a huge tree probably dating back to before the Spanish Conquest situated in a village a few kilometers above.

As I watched the dancing, I realized that despite the spatial restrictions, the Concheros do not touch each other, that their movements are predominantly in their feet and torsos, leaving the hands free to play various musical instruments. Facing inward, they dance in circle formation, enclosing their jefe (leader) and others who hold named positions. The dance is not performed for an audience, although on many if not most occasions there will be people watching. If the dance is a small one, locals will be present, people visiting the nearby church to pray, and curious passersby; at a large dance such as this one, people have come especially for the fiesta, to make offerings of flowers and prayers, and incidentally also to watch, and of course the omnipresent tourists. Predominantly, however, dancers enact for the sake of dancing, largely unaware of the image of their bodies in the eyes of other dancers in the circle, let alone in those of the bystanders, although the rich variety of their costumes may seem to belie this (Chapter 6).

A dancer never enacts alone but is part of a group (mesa). Each needs to work with the other members for necessarily they dance together and yet are apart, and this is of significance. The Concheros are backed by neither a formally endorsed institution (as are most churches) nor a prescribed organization (as are most religions). Rather they form a complex associative network of long-standing interpersonal connections and often affective relationships framed by the discipline of their tradition. Respectfully by means of the dance combined with their ritual prayers, the singing, and the music, the group as a whole aims according to the precepts of this oral tradition for union and conformity while each more individually may be moving toward the attainment of an impersonal and transcendent state of consciousness. The Concheros manifest a way of being that has become rare and certainly very different from the self-conscious and increasingly secular nature of everyday urban life.

To become a Conchero gives people the chance not so much to join an already existing organization (the Association of Concheros), although that is partly the case, but to be instrumental in an ongoing experiential process of a kind that particularly appeals to them.² As a multilayered phenomenon, the dance can be (and is) different for everyone, hence its appeal. No two dancers will necessarily give the same explanation as to what the dance signifies, and although most aspects of it display not only strong Catholic but also some indigenous influences, and increasingly those from other forms of spirituality, in the end each has his or her individual explanation. There is no one dogma: the metaphors deployed resonate differently for each (Chapter 5). Robertson Smith suggested a century ago that the practice of ritual is much more stable than the beliefs related to it.³ What matters to the dancers most is the experience of participating rather than speculating as to what their dancing means.

There is also not just one way of enacting. Each group has its own style, yet each group guards the forms of the dances and attempts to keep them as unchanging as possible. Perhaps somewhat contradictorily, although it is expected that celebrants exert strict conformity to the dance’s tenets, the dance can and does give agency to those who participate in a way that their everyday lives may not. This is especially significant for those who are frustrated by their lack of personal opportunities. To dance and follow the other practices too can provide that something that is otherwise missing in a person’s life and for many being a Conchero becomes of central importance. What that something is, is one of the questions that this book attempts to answer. The book does not catalog the dances per se but rather focuses on the practice of dancing: of what is going on as a dancer enacts (Chapters 4 and 5). It looks too at what some of the Concheros—with whom I danced and talked to at length—believe themselves to be doing while they dance and what their experiences of the dance were, which is different for each (Chapters 5 and 7).

EXPERIENCE AND THE EMBODIED SELF

Experience is notoriously hard to get at. People are either reluctant to talk about what they have experienced during a dance and/or have difficulty putting it into words: it is interior, individual, and above all a private matter. Although two dancers may execute the form of a dance in a very similar manner, what they experience and how they interpret that may be quite different.⁴

What the dance offers is the opportunity to re-member the body: to attain anew, by means of the body-as-experiencer, another kind of embodied state.⁵ It enables dancers to achieve a sense of connectedness and of intersubjectivity by means of a reawakening of all the senses, numbed by the doings of everyday life, and a rejoining (or re-ligio) with the earth by means of the feet: a form of unmediated experience.

For those involved in a full-time, routine job, five days a week in Mexico City, the daily round is often typified by a certain disembodied style of life, but the desire to try to compensate for this is strong,